USB drive

Smaller than the above picture, Dutch promotional product maker Deonet has created very small USB flash drive that holds up to 16 GB. The USB drive is so small, in fact, that the promotional information has to be put onto a tag that is separate of the actual drive, attached via a bit of string.

There's nothing quite like hacked-together, nouveau-vintage odds and ends to give your domicile a certain air of "Boy, that sure is neat." Autuin of Free Geek Vancouver (the same guy who brought you the Wi-Fi, picture-stealing picture frame) knows this well, which is presumably why he decided to take some old vacuum tubes and fashion them into light fixtures.
If you aren't intimately familiar with vacuum tubes -- and lets face it, you probably aren't -- they aren't actually designed to put out light. That being the case, Autuin rigged up the light fixtures to run at double the rated voltage, resulting in a nice little glow. And if vacuum tube lights weren't enough, he also put a modern day jump drive inside a vacuum tube. On his blog, he mentions that he thought it was sort of funny, putting millions of switches inside the body of one old one. I'm inclined to agree.
Check out more pictures after the jump.

We've already seen a steampunk cellphone and an entire steampunk apartment, so it seems like only a matter of time until all of our modern day luxuries have been dragged back into an alternate 1890. Will Rockwell is doing his best to help with that process. In addition to creating more far out things like a Spirit Harvester, Rockwell has effectively steampunked up an MP3 player and a variety of USB drives.

All of his intricate creations are up for sale at his Etsy shop, but beware, they don't come cheap; the cheapest steampunk USB drive you'll be able to get goes for $70 and most of the others are upwards of $100. Looking at them and drooling a little bit, however, is free.

Sure, your 256-bit military-grade encryption may keep snoopers out of your data for centuries, but why stop there? Why not make the lives of any would-be hackers miserable before they can even get their mitts on your data, and also look swanky in the process? That's what one Russian AutoCAD enthusiast must have been thinking when he created this wonderful little USB drive sleeved in a cryptex-style combination lock.
Unfortunately, it doesn't look like this little beauty will be making it onto Etsy or other fine steampunk purveyors. But if you have a machine shop at your disposal, maybe you can imitate this lovely design. And if you do, I will personally pay you a reasonable sum of money for it.
More pictures follow after the break.
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